FAMOUS GENETICIST, PHYSICIST TO VISIT AREA

San Diego 
Two significant names in science and medicine are scheduled to visit San Diego this week.

Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health and one of the most influential geneticists in the country, is set to spend part of today touring Life Technologies, the Carlsbad company that’s a world leader in the development of gene-sequencing instruments.

Collins also is scheduled to meet with the company’s executives to discuss potential advances in the life sciences, a topic that’s been in the news lately.

Last week, President Barack Obama announced the BRAIN initiative, a program that’s likely to devote billions of dollars over time in a quest to find ways to simultaneously monitor and map neurons. The end goal is to see how healthy brains work and what happens when autism, Alzheimer’s and other diseases and disorders develop.

Collins is a major advocate of the initiative, which is being designed with help from scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences and the University of California San Diego.

On Saturday, famed physicist Stephen Hawking will come to Kearny Mesa to attend a tree planting in memory of one of his oldest friends and benefactors, the late San Diego philanthropist Dennis Avery. Hawking and Avery were classmates at Cambridge University in England.

Avery became an attorney and was heir to the Avery Dennison label fortune. He also became a philanthropist, donating money to support Hawking’s work in theoretical physics. Avery and his wife, Sally Tsui Wong-Avery, also donated $6 million to found the Chinese Bilingual Preschool in Kearny Mesa, which opened in 2011.

Dennis Avery died in July. Hawking was scheduled to attend the funeral, but became ill and had to stay in England. The 71-year-old Hawking has been visiting California in recent days. Saturday’s tree planting, which will not be open to the public, is scheduled for 2 p.m.